1: Lamb wrap-up: Richard Scorer; 2: Another model failure .. deserts blooming; 3: On Steinman et al. (2015) – Michael Mann and Company Redefine Multidecadal Variability And Wind Up Illustrating Climate Model Failings; 4: Free Think; 5: The Met Office & The Pause; 6: Biomass Emits Double The CO2 Of Gas; 7: New result shows CO2 has almost no effect on temperature; 8: Conflicts of interest in climate science; 9: Weather Change on Planets – In Sync With Earth?; 10: Charting the costs and effectiveness of Renewable Energy in Europe; Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context..

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Lamb wrap-up: Richard Scorer

My report for the GWPF, Hubert Lamb and the transformation of climate science, has generated some public comment serving to enrich the historical discussion. See at Jo Nova, Bishop Hill, WattsUpWithThat, Breitbart and Quadrant. Others have corresponded privately by email. In the following few posts I pull out for comment a few topics that caught my eye. This one is thanks to David Unwin.

In my survey of early skeptics (GWPF report p33-5), rather than mention them all (there are just too many!), I restricted myself to a very special class. These are those like Lamb, who were leaders of key research groups in the field during the 1970s. This restriction meant that I left out of consideration many leading researchers. To give just two examples, there were Reginald Newell and Richard Lindzen, both at MIT in the 1980s when the scare hit, and both openly skeptical from the beginning. (For more about a few of the other leading skeptics, see in this book.)

However, in the context of Lamb’s skepticism, there is one contemporary who might qualify, but, if not, then he is certainly worth remembering. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Another model failure .. deserts blooming

Australia’s deserts have never looked so good as the last couple of decades. Rainfall has increased, Lake Eyre has even filled several times in recent years, where it used to be once in a hundred.

Temperatures, on the other hand are mostly unchanged or with slight warming, except where BoM have made ‘adjustments’.

Which makes this article from a Fairfax ‘dead tree’ journal, ‘balderdash’

Global warming: Australian deserts to expand as tropical circulation changes:

For the past few years, we’ve been showing in numerous blog posts that the observed multidecadal variations in sea surface temperatures of the North Atlantic (known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) are not represented by the forced components of the climate models stored in the CMIP5 archive (which were used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report). We’ve done this by using the Trenberth and Shea (2006) method of determining the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, in which global sea surface temperature anomalies (60S-60N) are subtracted from the sea surface temperature anomalies of the North Atlantic (0-60N, 80W-0).

As shown in Figure 1, sea surface temperature data show multidecadal variations in the North Atlantic above and beyond those of the global data, while the climate model outputs, represented by the multi-model mean of the models stored in the CMIP5 archive, do not. (See the post here regarding the use of the multi-model mean.) We’ll continue to use the North Atlantic as an example throughout this post for simplicity sake. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Free Think

Wei-Hock Soon is accused of failing to disclose funding from corporations in his research. We don’t seem to know if the funding was for any of the research but to the left-wing climate radicals, that doesn’t really matter.

This isn’t about climate folks. This never was. It is about politics and enacting a totalitarian style socialist government with the same faux democracy you see in China and North Korea. It is an openly visible government plot to gain ever more power. Driven by bureaucrats personally incentivized by the massive money and power government offers. It IS LED by liberal “progressive” Democrats and it is leading to a very bad place. Unfortunately, no political party is immune from power and the two primary parties we get to pick from are just different rates of change in the same very bad direction. Don’t believe me, then you need to learn your history better. You have been duped.

We are losing our freedoms in America at a massive rate, the internet just took a huge and completely unnecessary blow today. The unelected portion of the government gave itself the power to tax, regulate, limit and redistribute internet access. How long until we find preferred content getting favorable treatment. No Jeff, that would be illegal! If you think like that, you are again wrong… ever hear of the IRS. Are you really naive enough to believe that tax laws aren’t used as a political weapon? —I doubt it. Americans have no clue how much of their own medical freedoms they have just lost either, and it will be decades before they really figure it out. The massive tax increases which were finally enacted last year are already having a huge impact on businesses and employment. I have personal experience with that particular impact. Not that people care about business when the government adjusts the government employment performance numbers to hide their failure. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

The Met Office & The Pause

The Met Office have had another attempt at explaining the global temperature hiatus.

Biomass Emits Double The CO2 Of Gas

As we all know, burning coal and gas to produce electricity is BAD, but burning wood is GOOD.

But what do the actual figures tell us?

I asked DECC to supply comparative figures CO2 produced/MWh, for coal, gas and biomass (specifically wood pellets). I specifically requested that the biomass figures should purely relate to emissions from the power stations, and not to include “whole life” calculations. This was their reply: – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

New result shows CO2 has almost no effect on temperature

An article in the Daily Mail today piqued my interest. It trumpets empirical results which they say empirically confirm the theoretical CO2 greenhouse effect for the first time:

“Scientists have witnessed carbon dioxide trapping heat in the atmosphere above the United States, showing human-made climate change ‘in the wild’ for the first time.

A new study in the journal Nature demonstrates in real-time field measurements what scientists already knew from basic physics, lab tests, numerous simulations, temperature records and dozens of other climatic indicators.

They say it confirms the science of climate change and the amount of heat-trapping previously blamed on carbon dioxide.” – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Conflicts of interest in climate science

Once you tug on the thread of undisclosed financial interests in climate science, you’ll find it more a norm than exception. – Roger Pielke Jr (tweet)

Context

I started working on this post last week, in response to the Willie Soon imbroglio. This whole issue has now become personal.

In case you haven’t been following this, Justin Gillis broke the story on Willie Soon with this article Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. The Smithsonian issued the following statement on the issue of Soon’s funding and apparent failure to disclose this funding in journal publications. Science Magazine has a summary [here] and Nature has a summary [here].

Weather Change on Planets – In Sync With Earth?

No proof, but interesting evidence of a variety of changes in the weather on a few planets that looks like it is arriving more or less in sync with changes on Earth. Somehow I don’t think using your cars is causing it…

First off, the weakest change. A Dust Storm on Mars. Yeah, big deal. Mars and dust storms. The Usual comes to mind. But there are two things about this that caught my eye.

Charting the costs and effectiveness of Renewable Energy in Europe

A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Production Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy in Europe.

The diagrams below collate the cost and capacity factors of European Renewable Energy power sources, Onshore and Off-shore Wind Farms and Large scale Photovoltaic Solar generation. They are compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.